"There it is. That's oil coming out. I can smell the hydrocarbons," he said as gumball-sized tar balls bubbled up. "It's just poison soup is what that really amounts to."

Kopchak, a fisherman for 36 years, wasn't standing on a contaminated beach in Louisiana or Florida.

His rubber boots were planted on Prince William Sound in Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez hit a reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude in March 1989 - far less than the estimated 73.5 million to 126 million gall